Saturday, December 15, 2012

Only CTS 2010 Standard Cheque Books are to be used after 31.12.2012

Dear Bank Customer,

As per RBI guidelines, only CTS 2010 Standard Cheque Books are to be used after 31 December 2012.

Accordingly, all Banks are now issuing only CTS 2010 Standard Cheque Books to esteemed customers. In case you are having any non-CTS 2010 unused cheques with you, kindly surrender them at your branch and collect CTS 2010 Standard Cheque Books. These CTS 2012 Standard Cheque Books are readily available in all bank branches.

In view of the above and to ensure the time-bound migration to CTS-2010 standard cheque formats, all banks are advised to adhere to the procedures indicated below:

Arrange to issue only multi-city/payable at par CTS-2010 standard cheques not later than September 30, 2012. A confirmation stating that necessary arrangements have been put in place for issue of CTS-2010 standard cheques across the country may be submitted to this department by September 14, 2012.

Arrange to withdraw the non-CTS-2010 Standard cheques in circulation before December 31, 2012 by creating awareness among customers through SMS alerts, letters, display boards in branches/ATMs, log-on message in internet banking, notification on the web-site etc. Progress in this regard may be submitted to this department by November 30, 2012.

Banks holding post-dated EMI cheques (received either on their own behalf or on behalf of their NBFC clients) may arrange to ensure the replacement of non-CTS-2010 Standard cheques with CTS-2010 standard cheques before December 31, 2012.

Truncation is the process of stopping the flow of the physical cheque issued by a drawer at some point with the presenting bank en-route to the drawee bank branch. In its place an electronic image of the cheque is transmitted to the drawee branch by the clearing house, along with relevant information like data on the MICR band, date of presentation, presenting bank, etc. Cheque truncation thus obviates the need to move the physical instruments across branches, other than in exceptional circumstances for clearing purposes. This effectively eliminates the associated cost of movement of the physical cheques, reduces the time required for their collection and brings elegance to the entire activity of cheque processing.

Introduction of Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) technology during the mid-eighties has been the single-most important development responsible for making the cheque clearing popular and efficient – volume-wise, speed-wise and convenience-wise. At the banks’ end too, cheques in MICR format have facilitated post-processing ease in operations, affording credit to customer accounts and reducing reconciliation issues, thus improving customer service. Standardisation of cheque forms (leaves) in terms of size, MICR band, quality of paper, etc., was one of the key factors that enabled mechanisation of cheque processing.